Author: Diana Chinalieva

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Destruction of the house – week 3

This week was quite tough but fun, as we were learning how to destroy the wooden cabin, which we had built previously. Before creating the procedure to destroy the building, I went back to the Houdini script and slightly rebuilt the house, creating a much neater network. I also added the glass to the house, which previously wasn’t there.

Practicing on just the cube, it was quite informative learning about the basics behind the original creation of an already destructed object, as it cannot be easily programmed for it to break into various pieces. Those breaks and lines where the material will crack must be created by the user before any force could be applied.

Whilst following the lesson copying the guided procedure, I came across a problem when breaking my pre-built wooden cabin. For the pieces that are supposed to be active, the glue constraint isn’t working and hence the parts start to fall due to gravity before the ball comes in contact with the building. Hence the result. There is still some collision happening towards the end of the shot, as when it comes in contact with further pieces they get moved.

After attending the live Q&A session with Medhi, I managed to solve my problem by checking nodes for Constraints from Rules, ConstraintsProperties and Assemble. The problem was down to ticked boxes in the latter node. With fixing and setting up the correct requirements, the wooden cabin destruction was fixed.

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Machine modelling – week 4

This week I was focused on starting my machine model and creating all the necessary parts. I broke the original design down in 3 main parts on which I planned to work solely at different to each other times.

The breakdown

This week I focused on working at the first part, i.e. the wooden base, the metal base, the wheel and rod attached to it, with all the according parts which are positioned on the rod. I managed to finish most of the parts except facing a few challenges and hence not completing the entire plan.

Now, on this side of the wheel, in the metallic base underneath the 2 cogs that will be rotating there is a hole cut out in the specific shape, which I will be focusing on cutting out when I will animate the movement of the cogs, so it will be known how deep they would need to be. I also have bad wireframing on 2 parts of the rotating cog, specifically the elongated beam and the one of rectangular shape. These will be on my list of remaking the parts.

It came to my attention that on the left side of the main rod, the furthest element has a cut out hole into it, such that it looks that the screw is inside of it. I targeted that question to Nick during today’s class and got some ideas of how to solve this problem, without having to remodel the entire part again.

The plan for the following week is to focus on building the most of 2nd area of the machine, especially the mechanisms which have to be animated and finish on few missing parts from the first section. Then rig and animate some of the movement, so that I could place the rough version of the model into the actual scene, just as we practiced today during the Maya lesson.

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Planning phase

Last week, Jane, Giulia and I had a Zoom call together to discuss and plan the idea for our collaboration project. Being all VFX students, we were inspired by 3D and 2D projections of small animated objects in a pre-filmed 2D shot. As the main reference we took this video, from kidmograph account on Instagram:

@kidmograph, Instagram

The idea was to film or create an Art Gallery room, where the viewer (i.e. the camera) is taken around and shown various paintings, which have this parallax effect as the angle of perception changes, and 3D sculptures which have organic material growth around them. As the camera moves around the room, it ends by coming to the point of entrance where the final frame would loop in with the first frame of the video. I also wanted to put some particle movement, such as burning fire or flowing water in an enclosed space, such as museum glass display, quite similar to this post.

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CJxP9rJpOaT/?igshid=1llhuwvwttulp

When meeting for the 2nd time, we all have shown the visualization tasks we did as well as complied a document with all the resources and references we found. Whilst Giulia came up with a rough previsualization picture of the look of the room, Jane put up some 3D projections of a Vincent Van Gough painting in Nuke, to show that changing perspective. On my end, I created a rough storyboard of the camera movement in the room.

After the second Zoom meeting, we noted all the possibilities of acquiring the footage of a museum hall. The various ideas we came up with were:
1) seeing if a Tate modern was open and it was possible to arrange to film inside it;
2) finding a big hall with an access so that we could make it look like an art gallery room;
3) filming inside UAL;
4) using some stock footage;
5) getting a VR model of a museum hall;
6) OR modelling the entire hall ourselves.

We then scheduled a call with our tutor, Christos, to check all the possibilities with him and get any advice possible on the workflow of the project and how to do certain things, for instance camera tracking, which software to use for it, how to use that tracking information in Maya for models.

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3D camera track – week 4

This week we learnt about the 3D motion tracking. Having worked a bit in the 3D space in Nuke, it was important to understand the Camera Tracking node, all the settings within it, how the tracked information was incorporated into the scene and further combined with the original footage. I practiced with the two shots: first being a shot of a museum room and the second being the shot of Crypt we have been provided with.

The procedure went as follows: the footage was denoised and read back into the script. Then it was adjusted to be clearer for the camera tracked and tracked. I roughly knew the camera it was originally shot on, so that information was filled in accordingly. After that, with a general error being close to 1, with increasing the tracker length and adjusting the numbers for min and max errors, I got it down to 0.77, making the camera tracking information better as a result. That took a lot of trial and error procedure. Then I created the cards and placed them accordingly in the 3D space, alongside with the cones.

I also roto-ed out the sign in the left side of the space as well as the door and stone wall of the arch, as the camera moved in, revealing the second room.

Node graph

For the Crypt, I followed the same procedure, except I had to break it into 2 parts. Firstly, denoised and tracked the shot. Then, I created and placed the cards and cones into the first part of the space, rotoscoping out the big hole in the wall and placing it accordingly over various frames. After writing out the sequence with newly introduced assets, I read it back in the project and did the similar process for the room being revealed. Except this time I applied an Invert node to the roto of the hole in the wall, such that the planes and cones could be placed inside that area.

Node graph for the 2nd part
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Particle simulation – week 2

This week we were learning about varying and affecting the various attributes of an object (points, primitives, vertices). The creation of particle simulation effect involved the newly introduced VOPs and DOPs. It was quite fun to fiddle with the various force-inducing nodes, such as gravity, wind, force or drag, with which this swirl effect was created. This was my final result:

Geo1: node graph
Popnet graph
Attribvop graph
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3D space projection – week 3

Nuke has the ability to operate and compose in 3D space and this week we were learning more about it. We learnt of the importance of the nodes such as Camera, Scene and ScanlineRender and had to complete an exercise in projecting a 2D image onto a 3D space. I chose this image of a abandoned room to project.

Practicing to align the card node with the use of checkerboard, it took me a while to understand how to place it correctly in the scene. Before any placement I had to evaluate the camera lens that was used, and I chose the focal length to be 16mm, as it looks like it was a wide lens with big distortion towards the edges. The walls appear to be have a different incline in vertical directions and not entirely parallel to each other.

As the scene has smaller details, such as sneakers on the floor, a cable hanging from the ceiling or the opened windows – a further work using other cards with a roto of these elements could be done.

Node graph
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Wood cabin – week 1

In the first week of lectures on Houdini, we were talked through correct way of creating a project, a scene, the types of nodes (e.g. surface, dynamic, compositing, render), how to save a file and how to structure the node graph correctly to store the information successfully. In the end of the lesson we were shown a way to model a wood cabin, reference of which was taken from google search.

Reference
Close-up
My model
Show around the model

I started off by creating a box node, from which I shaped a wooden long plank. Then with the use of the copy node, I easily created 9 other copies, appearing to be stacked on each other. A frame shape of the window was added later, out of which with the use of Boolean I cut out the window. Repeating the same process for other windows and the main door, I realised that a shorter way would have been to apply the nodes for transforming for window made from the same box. Similarly, I could have used the same box and copy nodes for the back wall as for the front. After making the side walls of the cabin, I used a Boolean node to create the cut from the wooden planks to follow the tilted roof from the reference photo. One of nice additions could have been a use of PolyBevel node, to round the edges of the wood.

Node graph
Close-up
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Beauty and markers – week 2

It may be asked by an artist to do some touch-up on the actor’s face, such as removal of blemishes, wrinkles, de-aging, or something else. This week we focused on beauty work as well as some markers removal.

Beauty

I cleared out some redness from the nose, cheeks and forehead as well as the areas under eyes, to make her appear more rested and youthful. But it feels that due to movement of the face, the area that I cleaned up underneath the right eye appears to have darker tones in the first few seconds. I tried adding keys to the grade node, but it was affecting all the areas that were adjusted using rotopaint.

Marker

It is a common practice to remove markers from a face, body, object and this week we’ve been practicing removing the markers from an original shot footage. There were two ways we could go about it: the traditional where we create a rotopaint, roto, track it and merge with the original footage and a faster way where we use the VectorDistort node. The advantage of the latter is that it can be more accurate in storing the tracking information especially for a shot of a face/body.

In this exercise I practiced both ways and it can be seen in the node graph from below. A few challenges that I faced was the change in light and some physical difference in planar information for few dots.

Node graph
Traditional way: close-up
Faster way: close-up

As you can see on the right side, for the 2nd dot, I used a Grade node, settings of which I keyframed and adjusted to suit the changing lighting conditions. A similar problem was found the marker on right side of the mouth, where due to the folded part of the skin half of it had different light. To tackle this problem, I used a second grade node to which I applied a mask of a roto. This way I changed the grading of lighter and darker portions of the skin.

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Hierarchy – week 3

This week we focused on understanding the importance and use of hierarchy to the object. As a practice we followed a simple exercise of modelling the solar system planets orbiting each other. The sun was in the center of the universe, whilst Neptune was orbiting it, having 3 moons moving around itself.

We imported some colour maps from the online resource (Solar Textures | Solar System Scope) and added simple lighting to the scene, as the sun is serving as the main lighting point.

It was my 2nd attempt at animating the camera movement. It was interesting that the aim of the camera could be constrained to one of the planets, which we did in the end, whilst adjusting the offset at some frames to make it look somewhat less dizzy to the viewer.

This was a perfect example to see how the hierarchy could affect the movement and help out in setting the object to be moving around or according to a different one.

A further work could be done on this model, where different AOVs would be exported and using the ID pass we could add different effects to various planets further in Nuke. For example adding radiating light around the sun or subtle explosions on its surface.

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Rigging – week 2

Starting off a simple pump setup in Maya, we went through the process of modelling the cog, pump, pushrod, cylinder, etc.

After completing the simple model for this system, we progressed into learning about rigging, constraints and with the use of which constraints (point, parent) we could animate and restrict the movement of various parts of the pumping system. This was the final version of our rigging exercise.